Jeff Gordon is in the worst slump of his Winston Cup career–and loving it, in a way.
Not only has he gone winless in the past 10 races, he hasn’t even finished in the top five.
“I haven’t said, `Why is this happening to me?'” he maintained the other day. “I think it’s good to have to work hard for things.”
Then he drifted quickly into disclosure of why this slump is so, well, welcome.
“I know there was a time when a lot of people said I hadn’t had to work hard for things,” he said.
The worst and widest misconception about Gordon is that Hendrick Motorsports made him. Actually, Gordon made Hendrick.
Before Gordon’s arrival in 1993, Hendrick had won 32 races and no Winston Cup championships in nine seasons of operation. Since Gordon signed on, Hendrick has won 61 races (49 of those by Gordon) and four season championships (three of those by Gordon).
Gordon won 47 of those races with Ray Evernham as his crew chief. But Gordon outgrew Evernham’s paternalistic coaching style and their parting last year was unavoidable.
For his new crew chief, Gordon hand-picked Robbie Loomis away from Petty Enterprises, where the inside rap on Loomis was that he had difficulty making instantaneous, precise decisions about adjusting a car in midrace.
That Loomis still is groping was evident on the team’s radio channel last Sunday at Darlington, S.C., as the team struggled to make its Monte Carlo less fitful.
“We’re taking a half-pound [of pressure] out of the left rear and putting a little wedge in,” Loomis said. “That ought to help you a little bit.”
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A “little” wedge? Help “a little bit”?
Evernham never spoke so vaguely. Loomis concedes they have “a long way to go with our communication.”
What Loomis must learn is to be specific with Gordon, who is accustomed to precision.
Gordon acknowledges his own mistake in influencing the construction of the 2000 Monte Carlo may have caused much of the imbalance in the car and put Hendrick behind other Chevy teams.
“I’d always said, `Man, throw as much rear-end downforce into a car as you can, and then we [he and his crew] will worry about getting it to turn properly.’ Now I realize that the balance is the most important thing.
“You look at the wind-tunnel tests and the Pontiac is at the bottom of the list [aerodynamically], but they’re running great [two victories this season] because they have a well-balanced car.”
It will be a while before Gordon and Loomis get their cars and their communication fine-tuned. Until then, nobody can say Gordon is being handed anything.
Good old days: Dale Earnhardt’s tone was nostalgic for the way things may never be again in NASCAR. In the 1980s, at the peak of his roguish, slam-bang image, “we raced cars that were basically bullet-proof. We’d scuff the wall with them or get into a bump-up, and you could still race and win.”
Today’s cars are so sophisticated and so sensitive, they’re almost as delicate as prototype sports cars.
“If I raced an ’86 Monte Carlo against a 2000 Monte Carlo,” Earnhardt said, “I could probably rough up that new Monte Carlo a little bit and beat him because I’d have him bent-up a little bit, and I’d still be going straight.”
So it no longer matters how tough “The Intimidator” or any other Winston Cup driver is. The cars are sissies.
Season-opening sadness: The favorite for Sunday’s Championship Auto Racing Teams season-opening Marlboro Grand Prix of Miami? Michael Andretti, overwhelmingly. But there’s sadness in the status.
Andretti’s archrival on the 1.5-mile Homestead-Miami Speedway in recent years was Greg Moore, who was killed in the Marlboro 500 at California Speedway last Oct. 31, at age 24. Andretti won at Homestead in ’97 and ’98, but Moore won there last year.
With reigning CART champion Juan Pablo Montoya iffy to repeat–car owner Chip Ganassi has switched from Honda to Toyota engines this year–Andretti ranks as co-favorite to win this year, along with Dario Franchitti, who ran Montoya down to the wire for the title last year.
Hot laps: Take it to the bank: The delightfully iconoclastic Flavio Briatore, re-hired as boss of the Benetton team, will breathe new life and color into Formula One. With marching orders from new team owner Renault, Briatore–who in his first stint with Benetton guided Michael Schumacher to his first world championship–will rattle Ferrari and McLaren dominance of the world Grand Prix tour. . . . Gaining-on-it Dept.: Logical progression makes Tony Stewart the favorite for Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol, Tenn. In last year’s Winston Cup racing there, Stewart, as a rookie, led 54 laps of the spring event before being caught up in a wreck, then led 225 laps of the August race before Dale Earnhardt and Terry Labonte stole the show late. . . . The boom stops here: Speedway Motorsports Inc. mogul Bruton Smith, to get approval from the government in Sonoma County, Calif., for renovating his Sears Point Raceway, had to dump plans for 65,000 new grandstand seats and promise to limit events drawing more than 100,000 spectators to one per year–that being the Winston Cup race each June.
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Ed Hinton can be reached at [email protected]